


All Up In The Stars

by NotThatLamia



Series: Untagged [1]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fluff, Marper break-up, POV Raven, Post-Season 4, Raven deserves happiness, but also a lot of, like a lot, mentions of Jasper and Clarke's deaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-20
Updated: 2017-08-20
Packaged: 2018-12-17 19:35:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11858244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotThatLamia/pseuds/NotThatLamia
Summary: Life on the Ark was complicated. Raven found evidence of that the moment they arrived, when they all struggled for oxygen and were terrorised at the idea of dying in space and being forgotten there. They coughed and cried when their lungs filled with air once again. But the exhilaration of survival did not last long. Those first weeks were the most peculiar of her life, when anyone went from the happiness of being alive to the pain of not knowing who had managed to get into the bunker and survive. Everyone took their time to grieve, some longer than others.





	All Up In The Stars

**Author's Note:**

> We're already shipping Raven with Zeke, right?

 

 

Life on the Ark was complicated. Raven had known even before arriving, when she was still in Becca’s lab, building the rocket and unsure of how their relationships might change up there, and how each day might end up being hardly bearable after a fight or a misunderstanding. Of course, Raven also had not cared about that, because if there was a thing she believed, it was that getting to the Ark safe and sound was her aim, and living there would have been a problem for a future self. Science said they would’ve survived, and she trusted science more than she had ever trusted any living person. Hell, she had trusted science to bring her back to life and to survive on the ground. Not one person had ever done that for her. She had been saved, and helped to survive, by Clarke, and Abby, and Jackson, and many others, but no one had truly ever brought her back from the dead. And, it turned out, it wasn’t that bad that she had always had science beside her, since even Finn, the person she had loved the most in the world, had ended up betraying her in more ways than one.

Life on the Ark was complicated. Raven found evidence of that the moment they arrived, when they all struggled for oxygen and were terrorised at the idea of dying in space and being forgotten there. They coughed and cried when their lungs filled with air once again. But the exhilaration of survival did not last long. Those first weeks were the most peculiar of her life, when anyone went from the happiness of being alive to the pain of not knowing who had managed to get into the bunker and survive. Everyone took their time to grieve, some longer than others.

Murphy was the first to fully realise what had happened, and that they would die if nobody went to the aquaponic farm to get it started. A cockroach through and through, his struggle to survive at all costs was what made him wake up every morning for that. Emori followed him soon after, Murphy being her whole family, and the Ark being the first home she had ever truly had.

Raven, for her part, was the third to shake off the grief and to get to work. They only had five years, and she did not know if they were going to ever be enough to build a new rocket to bring them all back to Earth.

Bellamy was the fourth. She heard him cry one night, weeks after their arrival on the Ark. He had kept himself busy until that moment, but Raven had known him better than anyone else on the ground, and she could see he wasn’t right. He cried and screamed in pain, and very possibly punched the wall, if the bruises she later noticed on his knuckles were anything to go by. Raven knocked on his door that night, and he let her in and talked to her, for hours. He started with his family history, with Aurora and Octavia, and the men that had come and gone, and the fear and the sheer hate of the former Ark. He then told her about himself, about his struggles and unhappiness, and Raven kept quiet, because she could hear in his voice the compelling need he was feeling to pour his heart out to her. And then he talked about Clarke, and Raven knew and understood his pain, because it was the same she had felt after Finn’s death. She hugged him and told him he had to be strong, because they all were going to need that from him. And he held her and got strength from the hug. Raven told him she would’ve helped, and she would’ve tried - just tried because, really, what was he expecting from her? -, to be more careful and caring with everyone. That had never been her forte, though. That was Bellamy’s. After that day, he stopped being so clinical when mentioning the ground, and let himself miss the people that had stayed back.

Raven knew that Harper too had eventually come around when she showed up at the door of the place that had become Raven’s workroom, pleading her to find her something to do, something to live for, because she hadn’t been able to find it by herself. To which Raven would have liked to tell her she wasn’t going to find something to live for if she couldn’t see that she already had it, that she had friends, and a boyfriend, and that she was breathing and alive and in space again. She didn’t, because she had more urgent things to do, but that only delayed the explosion. It would have come two years later, in the dining room, when Harper and Monty, in a fight a long time coming, started bringing up every single thing they had been holding back since the very start of their relationship. It was rough, and it was also what made Monty come around. Everybody knew, but nobody ever said, that the time he had needed to grieve was not about the Earth, nor about Clarke. It was about Jasper, and about that part of him that had died with his best friend that day, and the fact that Harper would never be enough for him because of that.

Echo never stopped grieving for the Earth she had left, but she behaved already like Bellamy’s shadow by the moment they landed on the Ark. And soon, without anyone really noticing, she became a part of their family too.

 

 

By the aftermath of Monty and Harper's breakup, everyone had found their role in their miniature society. Bellamy led, and Raven built, and Murphy farmed, and Emori coded. And Monty and Harper were there when help was needed, every step of the way. They were there when they found the green patch on Earth, when Raven’s leg brace broke down and she was insufferable until she was able to gather enough material to make another, a better and more resistant one this time. They were there when Emori found Clarke’s messages. It filled them with energy and shame in equal parts. Raven had been beaming for two days straight and she was the one helping Bellamy recover from the shock, besides Echo. When he was around, she recalled small details about Clarke, and she asked questions, and she showed a general interest in his well-being. They never got close in a romantic way, because it couldn’t be like that between them. Because of Clarke, most of all. But also because Raven genuinely saw him as a coworker, a friend, a brother even, and she still found it hard making any sense of that one time when she had showed up in his tent and hooked up with him.

 

 

Almost six years and many unsuccessful attempts at going back to the ground later, a spaceship boarded the Ark. They could be friends or enemies, but they for sure would upset the delicate balance the seven of them had managed to achieve in those last few years. Raven wasn’t going to give up on that. In the end, however, it all went better than she expected. The members of the Eligius crew had no intention of staying in space longer than needed, and put aside their personal feelings to get to work. Of course, it wasn’t perfect, and one of the reasons for that was the existence of people like Zeke Shaw, who was arrogant and reckless, and exactly the kind of disturbing element to be avoided. Yet, a few weeks later, Raven began realising that perhaps his violent love for life was exactly what they had been lacking on the Ark.

Zeke crawled into their perfectly organised lives. He unobtrusively carved a place for himself, and became a part of their crew. He had an inquisitiveness that appealed to Raven, because it was very much like her own. But, differently from her, he took things as they came and he never strived for perfection. At times, he was so laid-back that he appeared almost uncaring. Yet, he also proved over and over how focused he could be, and how his superficiality came from knowing just how much importance to give to each event, to each problem. And that, for Raven, who always felt as if the world would crumble if she wasn’t good enough or careful enough, truly was a breath of fresh air. When Raven first realised how much she had come to rely on him, she asked him for help with the improvements on the Gagarin. Not because of his technical skills - much more competent engineers had come with his spaceship -, but because of his attitude. And Zeke, who had seemed so undeserving of trust at first, turned out to be the one to provide the support she needed to keep herself centered.

Weeks after she had first accepted him as her coworker, he asked her to go out with him, and Raven laughed because, really, where could they go on a spaceship? He brought her to an old conference room, one with a large rectangular window on the ceiling. He pointed at each one of the stars visible through it, and he gave made-up names to all the constellations he could make out in that moment, and he narrated a story for every one of them. He told her that one of them was the Raven constellation, and that it had been discovered a long time ago by an old traveller. The man had named it after his daughter, who was fearless and brave, and so beautiful that all the stars around the constellation bearing her name dimmed their light to let her reach her true brightness. It was all so cheesy that the person Raven had been on the Ark would have left him there at that. But she didn’t want to be that girl anymore. So, instead, she thought about how much she felt as if she was with Finn in that moment. But the young man beside her was a more mature and understanding and openhearted version of him, and, as such, a completely different person. She let his fingers card through her hair and she let him kiss her, with the stars shining above them and unspoken promises between them.

No person had ever brought Raven back to life. But in that moment, as she imagined herself walking once again on the ground, this time with Zeke beside her, she realised surviving and living were two different things. Science could bring her back from the dead. Science could let her survive. Zeke could be her first chance to actually live.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I can see Raven becoming kind of a cold person on the Ark, after everything she’s been through and all the struggles that she knows await her. She cares about Clarke, and about Bellamy, and about basically everyone on the Ark and on the ground, but I believe her work would come first on the Ark, and she would leave the leading and consoling to Bellamy.
> 
> Also, like many others have said since we got The News yesterday, I’m ready to ship Zeke and Raven forever. Unless he’s a jerk. In that case, I kindly request The 100 writers to keep him as far from Raven as they can. Since, you know, we’re best friends in real life and they read my fic for sure.
> 
> Thanks for reading! Come say hi on tumblr @ notthatlamia if you like!


End file.
